The United Nations and Palestine: partition and its aftermath.

587770 INO At key points in its history the United Nations has been a major player in the Middle East. It was the agency chosen by the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain and their allies in 1947 to enact the partition of Palestine through General Assembly Resolution 181. It bestowed international legitimacy on the nascent, borderless and still-expanding state of Israel, while postulating an abstract Palestinian state and protected international status for Jerusalem, neither of which were ever allowed to come into existence. But the UN's own power remained derivative - limited to what was granted or withdrawn, imposed or suspended, by the major powers whose creation the global institution was. Those powers had won World War II; the United Nations would assure they could continue to rule the peace. Of them all, from the beginning, Washington remained the paramount authority

Most of the time, on most issues, U.S. influence in (and often control of) the UN comes in the form of coercing the organization to take one or another position, or to reject some other position, or pressuring a country or countries to vote a certain way in the General Assembly or the Security Council or another UN agency. That may mean bribing Colombia with a new arms deal, offering China its much-desired diplomatic rehabilitation after the horrors of Tienanmen Square, or punishing impoverished Yemen by withdrawing all American foreign aid in response to its rejection of a U.S. demand.

Most of the time, on most issues, Washington's goal is to engage the UN, involving it, forcefully or otherwise, in a U.S.-orchestrated initiative. Most of the time it works, and the U.S. gets its way. But once in a while the U.S. gets its way using a slightly different, though no less effective, technique: using the same hard-ball pressure tactics ordinarily aimed at forcing the UN to take a specific action, it keeps the UN out, denying the world organization a place at the diplomatic table in those arenas that Washington is determined to keep under its own tight control.

Of them all, no issue has been more consistently targeted for this approach than the Middle East, and most specifically Palestine. Despite a myriad of largely unenforced resolutions over the years (those that were not vetoed outright in the Security Council), the U.S. has managed quite successfully to keep the UN out of the decision-making side of Middle East diplomacy.

After the 1967 war and the ensuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Arab Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai, the Security Council passed resolution 242, which first called for the exchange of (Israeli-occupied) land for (presumably Israeli) peace. Then in the early 1970s the UN played a key role in establishing the legitimacy and recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization, highlighted by Chairman Yasser Arafat's speech to the General Assembly in 1974. But since that time, the UN has been largely excluded, denied a role as a significant player in Middle East diplomacy as a whole, and especially not on the question of Palestine.

It is not a coincidence that the end of UN activism around the Middle East after 1974 matched, more or less, the beginning of the period in which the U.S. wielded its veto much more often, both in actual frequency and relative to vetoes cast by the Soviet Union (or any other Council member). Washington's vetoes exploded exponentially by the mid-1970s, and a very large percentage of them were used to block the Council from responding to Israel's occupation.

There is a particular irony to this reality. It was only after the 1967 war that support for Israel became an article of faith for a large portion of the U.S. population. There are a number of reasons for this phenomenal rise in Israel's acceptance and popularity in the U.S. (having far more to do with changes in Washington's Cold War-driven foreign policy imperatives than with the successful efforts of the Jewish community or the pro-Israel lobby), but the significance to this study is the correlation in time between that explosion of pro-Israeli sentiment in the U.S., and the growing popular opposition to Israel's occupations that emerged in most of the rest of the world - and in the UN.

While U.S. political, ideological and economic support for Israel grew, in many other countries, and in the United Nations as a multilateral whole, efforts took shape to demand an end to Israel's continuing military occupation and the resulting violations of human rights, and to affirm support for Palestinian national rights.

It is true, as Palestine's representative to the UN has pointed out, that even in those years it was difficult to forge a full consensus on the Palestine issue, even in the General Assembly.(1) But these were no Bosnia-like 49-51% international splits among the UN member states. Over and over again a near-consensus emerged, reflecting overwhelming support for an international peace conference under the auspices of the UN to resolve the conflict; for all parties including Israel and the PLO to take part in those talks; for an end to Israel's occupation of Palestinian (or Lebanese or Syrian) land. The votes always resulted in the whole Assembly voting in favor (often with some rather abashed abstentions), while only two countries voted against - the U.S. and israel. (Once in a while El Salvador or Costa Rica or Romania or Micronesia would vote with Israel and the U.S. against the rest of the Assembly.)

These Assembly resolutions reflected a clear UN consensus on the way forward toward solving what had been for so long an intractable regional crisis with clear global implications - a broadly representative international peace conference, sponsored by the UN or some component of it (the permanent members of the Council were often proposed as guarantors), with every interested party present at the table.

It was the kind of approach that would, as the Cold War wound down, prove at least relatively successful in crisis zones across the world - bringing together opposing parties to talk. But Israel, especially from 1967 on, absolutely rejected UN involvement. Tel Aviv viewed the UN as implacably antagonistic to Israeli interests, and approached the post-decolonization General Assembly, with its demographic dominance of the global South, as hostile territory. (Israel was not far wrong in its sense of isolation and antagonism from the GA. It was not forgotten in the Assembly that once the 4000-year-old theological justifications were stripped away, Israel's own colonial settlement project had itself come to fruition and UN-backed legality in 1948 - just when decolonization was emerging at the top of the agenda in the rest of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.)

Tel Aviv, standing on its own, would have been unable to stand against those initiatives. It might have stood its ground and refused to participate in such an international peace conference, but its refusal would have brought universal opprobrium and the likelihood of serious sanctions.

But Tel Aviv did not stand alone. Instead, U.S. interest in creating and bolstering a reliably pro-U.S. ally in the sometimes volatile and always (both economically and geographically) strategic Middle East, meant that Washington agreed to back Israel's rejectionism as far as Tel Aviv wished to go. Further, the primacy of Security Council intervention (such as Resolution 242 in 1967 and 338, mandating its implementation, in 1973) largely ended by the mid-1970s, in tandem with the U.S. marginalization of the UN as a whole. Instead, as decolonization transformed the once-compliant Assembly into a more independent voice of the South, the UN's involvement with the Middle East shifted there.

Given the realities of the UN's historic division between the democracy of the Assembly and the enforcement power vested solely in the Council, this meant that the General Assembly was largely free to pass resolutions condemning and demanding an end to Israel's occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Arab East Jerusalem. There were occasional serious U.S. interferences even with the Assembly (including Washington's refusal to grant Yasser Arafat a visa to address the Assembly in 1988, and the high-profile pressure campaign in 1991 to force the Assembly to revoke its 1975 "Zionism is a form of racism" resolution.) But every year Assembly sessions featured a consistent effort to pressure Israel.

While the language may have been tough, however, the resolutions lacked any means of exacting compliance. The pressure was limited to publicity and international public opinion and opprobrium, neither of which was of much concern to Israel. Without access to any enforcement mechanism, Assembly resolutions were routinely passed, routinely excoriated by Tel Aviv and Washington as evidence of UN "bias," and safely and routinely ignored.

The U.S. strategy did not, of course, mean excluding the entire UN from playing a role in occupied Palestine. For decades the UN continued to play the key role in humanitarian and development work in the territories. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), founded in 1948 in response to alnakba, continued its work, and in many cases, especially in the impoverished Gaza Strip and most especially in periods of long Israeli-imposed curfews and closures, helped assure basic survival of the Palestinians living in refugee camps. The UN Development Program has been involved for many years, and continues to play an even larger role in the period of so-called "self-rule" mandated by the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. Other UN humanitarian agencies, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UNICEF, and others also continue their work.

But overall U.S. concern in the Middle East, and especially regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, is strategic, not humanitarian. Washington has an interest in insuring that some modicum of social stability exists, and is perfectly willing for UN agencies to take the lead in providing basic survival support networks (thus substantially lowering what the U.S. alone might otherwise have to pay for). What the U.S. is not willing to accept is UN involvement in the political and diplomatic decision-making of the Middle East.

FIFTY YEARS AGO

The bi-polar U.S.-Soviet agreement on the partition of Palestine, and parallel efforts by Washington and Moscow to establish and maintain close ties with the nascent Israeli state, insured that neither the UN nor any other international institution was likely to respond to the Israeli capture of far more of 1947 Palestine than it was granted in Resolution 181. The partition agreement was ostensibly to include the creation of a Palestinian Arab state as well as a special international regime for Jerusalem under the UN Trusteeship Council. But those conditions were never met. Establishing UNRWA to alleviate some of the humanitarian crisis facing the Palestinians expelled from their homes was the primary response.

Faced with hundreds of thousands of refugees forced from their land and prevented by force of arms from returning, the UN enacted Resolution 194 in December 1948. The Assembly resolution provides that "the refugees wishing to return to their homes . . . should be permitted to do so at the earliest possible date" and that "compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return." Resolution 194 was routinely and unanimously readopted every year; by the mid-1990s, it fell victim to Washington's post-Oslo efforts to undermine UN involvement in the Palestine issue, but remained technically in force.

Throughout the 1950s, UN agencies remained actively engaged in responding to Israeli military provocations, primarily in Gaza and elsewhere against Egypt. When the Suez crisis exploded in 1956, the Council was unable to agree on a framework for a settlement. The French and British, who with Israel had launched attacks against Egypt, vetoed the U.S.- and Soviet-proposed resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw behind the 1949 armistice lines, and for respect for Egyptian sovereignty and territorial integrity. As a result, the 1950 "uniting for peace" resolution, under which the General Assembly took over from the Cold War-paralyzed Council the role of granting authority to the U.S. for the Korean War, served as the precedent for the Assembly's involvement. During Suez, the Council's paralysis was driven less by the Cold War than by power struggles among colonial and neo-colonial governments. By 31 October, the Assembly was convened in special session, since the Council itself was deemed paralyzed and unable to act. The Assembly called for an Israeli withdrawal, and established the UN Emergency Force, UNEF, the first UN peacekeeping operation.

As for Palestine, until 1967 the UN concerned itself primarily with the humanitarian and economic needs of the Palestinian refugees. UNRWA's mandate was repeatedly extended, and various resolutions called on Israel to comply with earlier UN decisions. During the six days of the June war, the Council passed four separate resolutions calling for a cease-fire. All failed. In the aftermath of the war, Assembly resolutions demanded an end to Israel's occupation and later annexation of Jerusalem, and the Council passed Resolution 242, stipulating the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, and calling for the Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and the exchange of land for peace,

The resolution led to still-unresolved battles over language: the French version uses the article "the" in referring to the occupied lands from which Israel must withdraw, implying all the newly-occupied territories; the English version, without the crucial "the," left open technical Israeli interpretations that only partial withdrawal was required to meet the Council demands. After Camp David, Tel Aviv often claimed that its relinquishing of the huge, but largely unpopulated, Sinai was sufficient. Despite the potential for stricter enforcement by the Council, which alone among UN agencies holds the power to impose binding economic, political or even military sanction on recalcitrant states, the embrace of Israeli rejectionism as part of an American Middle East strategy ensured that Tel Aviv would remain immune from punishment.

The 1970s saw a host of new UN resolutions focusing on Israeli human rights violations and on continuing "measures taken by Israel to change the status of Jerusalem." None were implemented; no sanctions were ever threatened or imposed. Following the October 1973 war, Security Council Resolution 338 called for a cease-fire in the current conflict and for full implementation of Resolution 242. A second emergency force (UNEF II) to monitor the cease-fire was established a few days later.

Also in 1973-74, a series of resolutions were passed that were to shape future UN positions, and reflect continuing international understandings. These included the first report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories, the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention to Israel's occupation, the call for an international peace conference on the Middle East sponsored by the United Nations, the addition of the Palestine issue to the regular session of the General Assembly, and in 1974, inviting the Palestine Liberation Organization to participate in plenary meetings and later to join in the work of all Assembly-led bodies as a full observer. The Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People was established by the Assembly.

On 13 November 1974, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat addressed the Assembly in New York. His "gun and olive branch" speech became emblematic of Palestine's emerging international diplomatic legitimacy. Following his speech, Assembly Resolution 3236 reaffirmed the "inalienable rights," including the right of self-determination, national independence and return. Twenty-nine November was designated the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The next year, the Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, identifying Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. That decision would later prove a focal point of U.S. efforts to force the Assembly to abandon its long-standing commitments to decolonization, non-alignment and defense of the global South, in order to bring the once-recalcitrant body to heel following the Gulf War.

The end of the 1970s also brought increased UN attention to Lebanon, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had fled following Black September in Jordan in 1970. In 1978, Israel invaded south Lebanon, aiming to destroy the Palestinian infrastructure there. The Security Council established the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, and passed Resolution 425 calling for full and complete withdrawal of Israeli troops. UNIFIL's actual mandate focused on "confirming" the expected withdrawal of Israel, and helping Lebanon to restore its authority in the south. However, Israel refused to withdraw. Tensions continued, with Israel bolstering existing rightist militias and creating its own surrogate force, the South Lebanon Army. A joint U.S.UN effort led to a temporary truce in July 1981.

Then in May 1982, Israel began new air strikes against the PLO in Lebanon, quickly followed by a full-scale invasion. UNIFIL positions were overrun, and Beirut was surrounded and under siege throughout the summer. Concerned about the need to protect the civilian population in Beirut, the Security Council authorized a team of military observers, but they were unable to accomplish anything. A multinational force, of French, Italian and American troops, went to Beirut in late August to oversee the evacuation of PLO fighters from the besieged city. The UN was not involved. After the U.S. provided assurances that the civilian Palestinian population left behind would be protected, the evacuation of the PLO concluded on 1 September, and the international troops were withdrawn. On 17 September, Israeli-backed troops entered Beirut with Israeli soldiers, and massacred the civilian population of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The Council resolution condemned "the criminal massacre of Palestinian civilians."

But Resolution 425, though still in effect, continued to be ignored. In 1985, Israel announced its intention to occupy a permanent "security zone" in south Lebanon. UNIFIL's mandate, renewed every year, remains to "confirm" Israel's withdrawal from the south. So far, there has been nothing to confirm.

UNESCO 

A much earlier example of the significance of the Palestine issue in Washington's overall UN strategy came as part of the intense U.S. efforts to undermine the UN in the 1970s, largely because the process of decolonization had led to the dominance of the South in the General Assembly. A key target of the U.S. campaign was an extended attack on UNESCO.

The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization had become a key arena of South-South cooperation, and was especially active in coordinating scientific research and providing assistance to countries in the South who found this support invaluable in their challenge to the North's hold on intellectual resources. The U.S. attack on UNESCO included relentless criticism of the agency's finances, management, and leadership. Coming in for special condemnation was UNESCO's long-standing Senegalese director-general Amadou Mahtar M'Bow.

The U.S. critique was wide-ranging, but the essential accusation was that UNESCO had become "politicized," meaning it had begun to reflect more overtly the legitimately partisan nature of an agency whose brief at least partly was to democratize the world's distribution of resources. By the early 1980s the Reagan administration had almost ceased paying its dues to UNESCO. But then the agency committed the final sin. It invited the PLO, since 1974 already an official observer organization of the UN, to join UNESCO on a similar basis, to participate in its educational/cultural activities. For the U.S., and especially for President Reagan's UN-bashing Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, such legitimization of the PLO was too much. In 1984 the U.S. withdrew its membership from UNESCO and stopped payment on all its assessments.

By the end of the 1980s, economic, social, human rights and other conditions in the occupied territories were rapidly deteriorating. December 1987 saw the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, across occupied Palestine. UN resolutions proliferated, some focusing on specific instances of Israeli violence against Palestinian protesters, others reasserting Palestinian rights under international law. As the UN itself describes the period, "since the very beginning of the uprising . . . the question of how to ensure the safety and protection of Palestinians in the occupied territory in accordance with the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War has received special attention." The UN report goes on to note that "a number of measures initiated in the Security Council in this regard were not adopted, owing to a lack of consensus among the permanent members."(2) As the escalating number of dead and wounded Palestinian civilians, especially children, could attest, Israel rarely took seriously the UN's call for "special attention" for the Palestinians.

THE U.S. STORMS THE UN DESERT

Israel's sense of impunity, however, was not because of a lack of UN attention. Throughout the last weeks leading up to the 29 November 1990 vote authorizing war in the Gulf, Israel's occupation and its anti-UN intransigence proved significant stumbling blocks in Washington's effort to recruit Arab and other partners of the global South to its anti-Iraq coalition. The continuing U.S. and Israeli rejection of UN resolutions and the global consensus supporting an international peace conference under the auspices of the United Nations, and the absence of any sanctions being applied, brought the issue of U.S. double standards to the front of the agenda - the agenda of the UN and the international community in general, but especially of the South. But the U.S. was willing to take the risks inherent in the double standard accusation rather than pressure Israel toward greater accommodation at that time.

Even in the immediate post-Gulf War period of Washington's sudden and enthusiastic embrace of the UN, a key exception remained the issue of Palestine. U.S. power in the political arena of the Middle East, unlike in the humanitarian and economic areas, took and still takes the form of preventing, rather than imposing, a significant UN role. That rejection by the U.S. continues despite Washington's search for stability and an end to conflict. (Ending conflict does not necessarily translate into ending Israel's occupation, since that is not of strategic concern to the U.S. But social and political tranquillity is.)

PULLING IN THE WELCOME MAT

In 1974, when the General Assembly invited Yasser Arafat to visit the United Nations, a limited visa was issued to the PLO chairman restricting his movements to a 25-mile radius from UN headquarters. According to the Host Country Agreement signed between the U.S. and the UN, Washington had little choice but to issue it, however grudgingly. The international attention generated by his famous "freedom fighter's gun and olive branch" speech played a key role in winning UN recognition of the PLO as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people, as well as observer status within the UN itself. It also helped to gain broad international recognition, including full diplomatic relations with numerous countries, for the organization.

Washington knew that much of the PLO's credibility, especially in the 1980s when its armed actions had significantly dwindled, could be traced to Arafat's UN appearance. As a result, when the Assembly again invited the PLO leader to address the body, in December 1988, Washington was in a quandary. It was a delicate moment. Only a month earlier, the PLO's parliament-in-exile, the Palestine National Council, meeting in Algiers on 15 November, had declared an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The intifada, characterized by mass popular resistance in the occupied territories and Palestinian children throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, was at its height.

But the U.S. was still bound by a 1975 commitment to Israel that it would not recognize the PLO. What Washington and its Israeli junior partners did not need just then was a new boost to the PLO's credibility - it was bad enough that leading Palestinian voices inside the occupied territories, with new credibility in the West as well as at home, continually asserted that anyone who wanted to negotiate an end to the intifada could find their representatives at PLO headquarters in Tunis. A parallel international campaign further legitimating the PLO and crediting it with the largely non-violent intifada would mean a disaster for Tel Aviv, and a public relations nightmare in Washington.

So in 1988, the U.S. decided the best way out would be to use its power as Host Country simply to deny a visa to Arafat, barring him from the U.S., thus refusing outright to allow the UN to hear him speak. While the Host Country Agreement allows certain narrowly construed circumstances under which the U.S. might legally deny a visa to someone invited for an official UN function, nobody was fooled. The claim that Arafat's brief visit to New York somehow represented a "security threat" to the U.S. was nonsense; the State Department did little to try to justify it.

The result was almost comic. The entire General Assembly, including Secretariat officials, translators, clerks, security guards, public information people, and more, packed up and decamped from New York to Switzerland. The cost, for a single two-hour meeting and a couple of press conferences in Geneva's Palais des Nations was astronomical, at a time when Washington was already complaining about the UN's profligate standards and inappropriate use of funds. The question of double standards re-emerged.

(The later irony, of course, was that any potential PLO propaganda bonanza that might have resulted from Arafat speaking to the UN in Geneva was immediately overshadowed by Washington's own use of the occasion to announce its new official recognition of the PLO and a bilateral diplomatic initiative. Compared with the long-denied high-level official meetings with the U.S., an invitation to join a few more UN agencies or even a prized Arafat appearance on U.S. television would mean little. Except for the UN's enormous costs in overtime pay, plane fares, taxis, hotel accommodations, meals, and other expenses for the New York-based staff, little had changed.)

DESERT STORM CLOUDS OVER PALESTINE

In the period leading up to the 29 November 1990 passage of Resolution 678 in the Security Council, authorizing the use of force against Iraq, the U.S. diplomatic team at the UN was focused on preventing the Council from discussing a proposed resolution aimed at protecting Palestinians living under occupation.

The resolution had been proposed in response to the October killing of at least twenty-two Palestinians by Israeli military authorities on the steps of the Haram al-Sharif, or the Temple Mount. The attack, and the international outrage it generated, threatened to derail Washington's carefully constructed U.N. role in the Gulf military build-up.

Within hours of the killings, the seven Non-Aligned members of the Security Council introduced a resolution backed by the PLO. It won immediate support, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, from 14 of the 15 Council members, even including Britain, whose ambassador, Sir David Hannay, was that month's President of the Council. The U.S. was the one hold-out.

The resolution initially did not use the word "condemn" in reference to the attack. It "deplored" the killings, a lower level of criticism in diplomatic parlance. But far more significantly, it called on the Council to send its own mission to Jerusalem to investigate the killings and to return with recommendations for how Palestinians living under occupation could be protected.

The debate was sharp, with many speakers expressing their nations' outrage at the carnage in al-Aqsa Mosque. The Malaysian ambassador, despite his government's close ties to the U.S., was among the strongest voices. He called Israel's policy "truly a bloody one." He cautioned that Israel and its friends "must not be allowed to . . . masquerade behind what the Israeli representative described as 'the international coalition mustered against Iraqi aggression.'" He spoke of possible sanctions against Israel, stating that "the Council could not ignore those serious Israeli violations in the light of recent developments in the region. To do so would mean that the Council was allowing double standards to prevail over justice and moral considerations." The French, supporting the call for a Council-sponsored mission, spoke of the necessity of the Security Council receiving "on the spot information" directly in order to move forward.

U.S. diplomats forced a delay in the vote. By the next afternoon, Washington had submitted its own resolution, which became, for the U.S. press, the only one under discussion. The U.S. draft used the stronger word "condemn" for the first time. But PLO diplomats, and the Non-Aligned Council members supporting them, made clear that they were not concerned about issues of language. The real sticking point was the nature of the investigation team to be sent to Jerusalem. Washington's proposal left the Security Council out of the picture, calling instead for the secretary-general to send his own representative. While SG missions had traveled to Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories before, they had never had any impact on persistent Israeli violations of international law and human rights. The special representatives would go, look, and return, without the influence, prestige, and ultimately enforcement power of the Security Council, the UN's highest body.

Palestine's Permanent Observer to the UN at the time, Ambassador Zehdi Labib Terzi, made clear his delegation's priorities. Outside the Council chamber, speaking at 1:00 a.m. on 9 October, he said, "We are not interested in semantics; what we want is for the Council to take action. The U.S. draft does not call on the Council to do anything."(3)

The immutable U.S. rejection of a Council role was rooted partly in U.S. support for Israel's long-standing rejection of any internationally-mandated ombudsman position monitoring its adherence to or violation of international human rights conventions. But it also reflected the U.S. recognition that such a resolution would finally place the Council in a position of assuming responsibility for the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. That, for the U.S., represented the first step down the slippery slope toward a UN-sponsored international peace conference. U.S. backing for Israeli rejection of such a conference remained a cornerstone of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, and not even the new set of commitments to new Arab allies would change Washington's position.

What was different this time around was the potentially fateful consequences of a U.S. veto. In past incidents of Israeli atrocities, a routine U.S. veto on the grounds that a resolution was "one-sided," or that it "did not advance the peace process," would be roundly condemned, but then set aside.

This time, Washington's carefully constructed Arab legitimacy for its military build-up in the Gulf could not afford the political fall-out of a U.S. veto of a Council resolution condemning Israel's bloodbath at the doors of one of Islam's holiest shrines.

The governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, in particular, as well as Syria, were uneasy about the consequences of a U.S. veto. They stood to lose even more popular support if they continued backing U.S. troops against Saddam Hussein in the face of Washington's veto of Palestinian rights. Nonaligned diplomatic sources indicated that Saudi and Egyptian pressure on the PLO to give the U.S. a compromise way out was "fierce."

A Soviet diplomat announced in the early morning hours of 10 October that his government would not back down "unless the Palestinians agreed." Palestine's diplomats did not agree, however, hoping that the commitments of other Council members to support a Council mission would remain strong. The French and the Canadians refused early U.S. efforts to persuade them to abandon the Non-Aligned resolution.

By the night of 10 October, the British had engineered a compromise, calling for the secretary-general to send a representative, but asking that he report back to the Council. The observer's mandate abandoned earlier language calling on the Council to find ways to protect the Palestinians living under occupation.

Throughout the days and nights of 11 and 12 October, the U.S. rope tightened. Washington cajoled its Western allies, alternately pressuring and threatening the Non-Aligned members of the Council. Late on the night of 12 October the vote was taken, and Resolution 672, calling for only a representative of the secretary-general to investigate, was unanimously accepted.

Unanimity had been preserved - or imposed. But the U.S. refusal brought the question of Washington's double standards to center stage. U.S. credibility among the developing countries, and among some of its Western allies at the UN plummeted.

As it happened, the U.S. battle may have been unnecessary. Israel responded to the resolution by immediately announcing its refusal to accept any UN mission, including that of the secretary-general. In response, the Council passed Resolution 673 on 24 October, reaffirming Israel's obligations as a member of the UN to accept Council resolutions and urging Tel Aviv to "reconsider its decision . . . and to permit the mission of the secretary-general to proceed."

The SG's special representative ultimately made a brief trip and reported to the Council. A new resolution was drafted in response to that report, aimed at broadening UN involvement in protecting Palestinians living under occupation. But over the next two months, from mid-October until 17 December, while the military build-up in the Gulf continued at breakneck speed, the U.S. continued its efforts to delay the vote and to strip the proposed resolution of anything likely to offend Israel.

The original language of the resolution called on the Security Council to deploy troops from UNTSO (the UN Truce Supervision Organization, deployed on Israel's borders with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt since 1949) to monitor the treatment of Palestinians living under occupation. It condemned Israel's policy of expelling, or deporting, Palestinians, and demanded that the practice cease and that those expelled be allowed to return. And, for the first time, it would have placed the Council on record supporting an international peace conference long called for by the General Assembly, to solve the crises of the Middle East.

The next draft dropped the reference to UNTSO, and called for a commissioner representing the secretary-general, not the Council, to be sent to the occupied territories. The third draft dismissed that idea, and simply called for an SG representative to monitor the situation.

U.S.-backed versions also replaced the earlier language that "condemned" Israel's expulsions of Palestinians with a softer criticism that "deplored" the practice. Washington also deleted calls for Israel to stop expelling people or to allow those already expelled to return.

When Washington forced the first delay in the vote, it was a long enough break to convince its European allies to weaken the terms of the original resolution. Then another delay was imposed, and another. On 1 December, Yemen's Ambassador Abdullah al-Ashtal took over the presidency of the Council. Discussion of the resolution resumed on 5 December.

In all, the Council prepared and was ready to vote seven times. But seven times, U.S. diplomats managed to orchestrate delay, each time draining more power from the proposed resolution.

The final drafts acceded to the long-standing U.S.-Israeli rejection of an international peace conference by removing the reference to it from the operative paragraphs, and relegating that reference to a separate statement issued by then-Council president, Yemen's Ambassador al-Ashtal. (Presidential statements, while reflecting Council unanimity, do not have even the pretense of enforceability.)

The U.S. was determined that the enforceable sections of the resolution exclude anything the Israelis would be likely to reject (which included virtually all of the proposals for protection of Palestinians). The White House was quietly nervous that some Non-Aligned Council members might actually propose sanctions against Tel Aviv to force its compliance with the Council decisions - using Washington's own anti-Iraq sanctions as precedent.

Some time after midnight the night of 17 December, the U.S. once again forced a delay, this time pressuring the Council to call a halt until the morning of 19 December. By that time there were so many drafts circulating that neither the exhausted Council diplomats nor the punch-drunk UN press corps could keep track.

Forty-eight hours later, the Council voted unanimously to accept Resolution 681 in a form that bore little resemblance to the original version introduced seven weeks before. In fact, it was virtually unrecognizable. It had been stripped of the call for the Council to deploy UN troops to protect Palestinians, lost the condemnation of Israel's expelling Palestinians, and the demand that it stop the practice and allow those expelled to return home. It had even lost the renewed call for an international peace conference, a long-standing UN principal despite vehement opposition to it by Washington and Tel Aviv, and seen it replaced with a non-binding suggestion by the Security Council president.

The breathtaking double standard of Washington's UN responses to Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and Israel's occupation of Palestine did not receive much attention in the mainstream U.S. media. In an especially cynical example, an article by New York Times reporter Paul Lewis, describing Washington's effort at gutting the already-enfeebled fourth draft resolution, was headlined "U.S. Backs UN Bid Criticizing Israel." Implying U.S. leadership in the anti-Israel effort, Lewis asserted that the "United States has agreed to sponsor a new United Nations Security Council resolution critical of Israel to avoid a rupture in the Arab coalition it has assembled against Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait."(4)

TALKS IN THE HALLWAYS

U.S. reliance on the UN for credibility in the Gulf War did not extend to its post-Gulf political initiative. Once the military part of Desert Storm had ended and the U.S. had declared a yellow ribbon victory over the bodies of somewhere between one and three hundred thousand Iraqis, the political component of the Gulf War, the Madrid process, began. It was crafted to simultaneously implement and reflect the newly unchallenged system of U.S. domination of the vital Middle East. Only within that new political environment in the region, in which Arab unity had been shattered by the U.S. anti-Iraq coalition and the U.S. itself emerged as the worlds' sole superpower, would Israel agree to sit face to face, for the first time, with its Arab opponents themselves now uniformly dependent on, and to an unprecedented degree accountable to Washington.

The Madrid "peace process" set the terms for four separate sets of negotiations - between Israel and Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians. (The talks would not, officially, be with the PLO, and Tel Aviv's U.S.-backed legal fiction insisted that the restricted Palestinian diplomatic team, made up only of Palestinians from inside the occupied territories not including Jerusalem, be officially considered a sub-set of the Jordanian contingent.)

Despite the multi-party participation, with the presence of high-level diplomatic teams not only from the U.S. and Soviet co-sponsors but from the European Union and numerous countries in the region, there was to be no illusion that this was the long-sought "international" peace conference on the Middle East. Israel had agreed to participate only if the high-profile opening formalities, in Madrid's glittering Crystal Palace, were designed only as the prelude to separate bilateral talks with each of the Arab parties; the terms of reference even specified that the multi-party conference would only be reconvened if all sides agreed - giving Israel a veto over even any appearance of real multilateral negotiations. As for the United Nations, its single representative was ordered humiliatingly silent by the joint agreement of Washington and Tel Aviv.

The terms for an Israeli agreement with Syria were set, in fact if not on paper, when Damascus agreed to join Washington's anti-Iraq coalition. The payback would come after Desert Storm had functionally leveled Syrian President Hafez al-Asad's long-standing Ba'ath Party rival in Baghdad. The Israel-Syria conflict engendered the bitterest level of acrimony of any of the Middle East disputes, but in fact the basis for an agreement was long known. What would comprise the final terms was clear long before the opening speeches, filled with vitriolic posturing on both the Israeli and Syrian sides, were made in Madrid.

Syria would get at least official, if not complete on the ground, Israeli withdrawal from the once-strategic (though questionably so in the era of advanced missile technology) Golan Heights, and Israeli acknowledgment of formal Syrian sovereignty. In return, it would provide Tel Aviv with continued guaranteed access to Golani water sources (a key reason for Israel's concern about giving up the Heights - far more important than security); family reunification for the 15,000 Syrians living under Israeli occupation would be arranged; the demilitarization of not only the Heights, but a major chunk of Syrian territory below the Heights would be guaranteed by international (U.S.led, and definitely not UN) troops; and Israel would get something called peace and relative normalization with its long-standing enemy. All would be arranged and imposed under stringent U.S. guarantees, with financial and political rewards for compliance (more cash for Israel, removal from the list of "terrorist states" for Syria); and threats of punishment for (at least Syrian) resistance. After the bombast, what was actually left to negotiate were exact details, and a timetable.

Once the Syrian-Israeli agreement was set, Israeli-Lebanese talks could be expected to fall into place. Israel would be expected to withdraw from at least part of the Lebanese territory it had occupied since 1978, in return for Syrian guarantees that no Palestinian forces would be allowed to launch attacks from the area. As for Jordan, its real battle with Israel had been over for years; its official state of belligerence was simply derivative of Jordan's unwitting geographical and historic involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and actual Jordanian-Israeli relations had been cordial and cooperative for a generation. Making it official, with the signing of the Israel-Jordan accord in the Spring of 1994, was clearly a reflection of motion on the more significant Israel-Palestine front.

In none of these negotiations was the UN called on - or allowed - to play a role beyond that of cheerleader.

PALESTINE

But Palestine was much more complicated. Five months of shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State James Baker following the defeat of Saddam Hussein led to the agreement of Israel and the Palestinians to join the Madrid talks.

The terms of participation of Israel and the Arab parties was guaranteed through Letters of Assurance agreed to between the U.S. (with the Soviet Union haplessly following along) and each government. Preparation of the Letters, whose final text was never made public, was based on Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) drafted jointly by the U.S. and each country.

While none of the MOUs called for UN involvement, the U.S.-Israel MOU spelled out a stunningly explicit exclusion of the world organization. In paragraph 7 the U.S. assures Israel that the "UN representative will have no authority. He [it was assumed to be a he] may hold talks only in the hallways, note down the content of the talks, and report to the secretary general."

An addendum to paragraph ten goes on to assert that the "United States is also required to make a commitment that the UN Security Council will not convene to discuss the [Middle East] conflict during negotiations. . . ."(5) The explicit restrictions on UN involvement set the stage for a clear articulation of limits on the geographical/political areas where UN participation was not to be allowed.

Other, more direct U.S. pressure on the Assembly emerged as well. As part of its post-Desert Storm diplomatic offensive in the Middle East, Washington promised Israel that a key goal of its UN agenda would be the overturning of the 1975 General Assembly resolution which identified political Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. In fact, the Bush administration committed itself to winning that repeal as one of the conditions to assure Tel Aviv's participation in the Madrid peace conference. In one leaked version of the final U.S.-Israel Letter of Assurance, Washington agreed to "take steps to . . . have UN Resolution 3379 equating Zionism and racism annulled."(6)

The 1991 General Assembly session, the first since the end of the Gulf War, saw a succession of heads of states, including President Bush, extolling the UN's role in the "New World Order." For the Bush administration, that order meant bringing the Assembly to heel to reflect the new international realities. By November, once the Assembly's ceremonial parade of presidents, kings, emirs, and prime ministers had ended, U.S. diplomats took off, criss-crossing the globe using Gulf War-tested methods of bribing and threatening other nations to win support for the repeal effort.(7)

Washington's position was that the repeal vote must be taken without discussion, without debate. The original resolution's identification of Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination was understood to reject the Israeli claim that a 4,000 year-old theological assertion somehow granted modem Jews from anywhere in the world the right to expel the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants from their homeland, as well as to criticize the ethnic/racial privileges allotted only to Jews in Israel. Under the U.S. fiat, now, member-states were not to have the opportunity to discuss whether they believed Israel's occupation had fundamentally changed, or whether they believed the resolution was rendered moot by changing diplomatic realities since the Gulf War, or whether they in fact believed now they had been wrong sixteen years before. The vote, instead, was to be swift, unequivocal, and as close to unanimous as possible.

(It should be noted that the resolution was repealed in the midst of Israel's most severe escalation of West Bank/Gaza repression in months. Numerous towns, villages, and refugee camps, only recently released from the Gulf War's 40+ day curfew, were once again under 24-hour-a-day curfew imposed by the Israeli occupation authorities, and arrests, land confiscations, and forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes were at that time all on the rise.)

On 16 December 1992, just three months after President Bush had promised to get the repeal passed, the General Assembly voted. Washington's bribes, threats, and persuasion worked, and virtually without substantive discussion the Assembly voted overwhelmingly to overturn the resolution.

At the tactical level, the vote was clearly part of U.S. efforts to smooth relations with Israel at time when Tel Aviv had announced its anger at a number of perceived slights by the Bush administration, and amid an Israeli unease that in orchestrating control of the post-Gulf War Middle East, the White House was turning toward the Arabs. In fact, the repeal vote presented Israel with its first prize as Washington's most favored nation of the New World Order.

But more broadly, the vote - 111 countries for repeal, 25 countries opposing repeal, and 13 abstentions - provided a clear look at the emerging alignment of power and influence in the new world order's United Nations.

U.S. diplomatic pressure quickly pushed the number of co-sponsors of the repeal resolution past fifty. Less than ten days before the final collapse of the Soviet Union, and given still-President Gorbachev's desperate search for Western aid, Moscow's support for repeal was unsurprising. More revealing was the division the U.S. was able to forge within the Non-Aligned Movement and other developing countries: long-standing critics of Israel's occupation, including nations such as India and Mozambique voted for repeal, Angola and Laos abstained, and only Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea stood with the Arab and Islamic opponents of repeal.

What was also a telling testament to Washington's heightened levels of influence in the region, was the number of Arab countries whose ambassadors ducked out of the Assembly hall or who refused to participate in the vote. Among those non-participants (which also included China) were Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman and Tunisia - all Arab states that supported the U.S. during the Gulf War and that maintained a realistic hope of significant upgrades in political, military, or economic aid from Washington. While Saudi Arabia voted against repeal, Saudi Ambassador Samir Shihabi (a Palestinian by birth), who was then president of the General Assembly, was himself absent for the vote. A lower-ranking and lower-profile Saudi diplomat cast the "no" vote, and the Assembly session was presided over by its vice-president, the Honduran ambassador.

MURDERS IN AL-KHALIL

Early in 1994, when an Israeli settler-soldier murdered twenty-nine and wounded scores of Palestinians inside the ancient al-Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, there was a new effort to get the Security Council on board, not only in condemning the massacre but in trying to do something to prevent such occurrences in the future.

Once again the resolution was delayed by the U.S., ostensibly because of its references to Jerusalem as part of the occupied territories, but also because it authorized a "temporary international presence" to be sent as observers in Hebron, something Israel had long opposed. But significantly, the resolution even specified they were not to be UN peacekeeping troops, but rather "international observers" not under UN Blue Helmet command. The secretary-general volunteered to send observers, but the U.S. condemned his offer as not being "particularly helpful or useful." The debate raged for over three weeks, and in the final agreement the U.S. demanded a separate vote on each paragraph of the resolution.

The U.S. objected to two paragraphs. One, in the preamble, described the Security Council as "gravely concerned by the consequent Palestinian casualties in the occupied Palestinian territory as a result of the massacre, which underlines the need to provide protection and security for the Palestinian people." (The objection here appeared to be that there was no parallel call for protection of Israelis.) And "Reaffirming its relevant resolutions, which affirmed the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949 to the territories occupied by Israel in June 1967, including Jerusalem, and the Israeli responsibilities thereunder. . . ." The second objection was to the Council "reaffirming its relevant resolutions, which affirmed the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949 to the territories occupied by Israel in June 1967, including Jerusalem, and the Israeli responsibilities thereunder. . . ."

In the final vote, Washington abstained rather than vetoing the references to Jerusalem. U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright said she did not veto the resolution because the offending references were "only" in the preambular paragraphs, not in the operative language; presumably, therefore, the U.S. could ignore them with impunity. The final decision sent 160 observers, mostly Norwegian and a few Italian, as observers to Hebron, only sixty of them actually working in the field. They were not Blue Helmet soldiers or observers; most of them had been involved in various NGO-related work. They had no means of insuring even their own protection.

Perhaps inevitably, the observers were immediately dubbed the "ice cream soldiers," not only because of their white uniforms but because at the first sign of trouble, they melted. (It should be noted that this assessment had nothing to do with any lack of personal courage; the observers were well-motivated, brave, and many of them worked very hard. Many had worked for non-governmental organizations in their home countries, or in various development projects.) But their mandate severely limited their activities. They were ordered only to observe the actions of Israeli soldiers and settlers. If abuses were seen, they had no authority to intervene, but could only report to UN officials who would relay the information to someone in New York. The last public report of their work was in May 1994, when Israeli soldiers ordered them out of a part of Hebron where Israeli settlers and reportedly soldiers were firing on unarmed Palestinians. In a 1997 visit to Hebron, they spoke of continued frustration with the limitations of their mandate. Would official UN peacekeepers have been better? It is uncertain, but what is certain is that there is little or no legitimacy for independent "foreign observers."

MADRID TO OSLO

But in the meantime diplomacy went on, not only through the faltering and (we now know) irrelevant Madrid talks, but through the back-door Israel-PLO channel sponsored by the Norwegians. And after the signing ceremony of the Oslo Accord in Washington in September 1993, Yasser Arafat came back to the UN, to New York again this time. After his meeting with the secretary-general, I asked Arafat whether he had discussed with Boutros-Ghali any plans for increasing an active UN role in guaranteeing or maintaining the future peace. The PLO chairman could say only that they had discussed better and higher-level coordination of the UN institutions already working in the occupied territories. That meant the economic and humanitarian agencies alone - once again the UN was out of the political loop.

WHAT PEACE TO KEEP?

As for on-going UN peacekeeping operations, despite their expansion and redefinition, there is a continuing campaign in the U.S. government and press aimed at keeping UN Blue Helmets out of the region. It emerged strongly around the issue of observers for an Israel-Syria agreement on the Golan Heights. It is understood and accepted by all sides that the eventual international peacekeeping force monitoring Israel's withdrawal from and Syria's commitment to demilitarization on the Golan Heights will not involve UN Blue Helmets. Rather, a U.S.-based "multinational force" will monitor the withdrawal lines, reflecting Israel's traditional rejectionist posture toward the UN, as well as Syria's apparent lack of concern with bolstering the international organization's credibility and power.

Some point to the need of both Israel and Syria for an international force that cannot be dislodged by either side withdrawing permission for its presence as the reason for going around the UN. But this denies the reality that if both sides agreed to accept a UN deployment under Chapter VII (for which the consent of the parties is not required), the UN would be well-positioned to carry out the responsibility of guarding a Golani peace.

Lee Hamilton, an influential member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote that his preferred model of a "successful" peacekeeping operation is the Multi-National Force and Observers (MFO) in the Sinai, the observer body mandated by the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David Accords. Hamilton defines the MFO as successful precisely because it is not a UN operation. The MFO "holds valuable lessons," he writes, "particularly in the Middle East. . . . Because it operates outside the UN system, it has been innovative in important ways that UN peacekeeping should emulate. . . . The MFO can hire its own staff, and has hired top-notch people, without concerns about UN-style nationality quotas. . . ."(8) The implication is that "top-notch people" will only be found outside the UN. Ironically, despite Hamilton's implicitly racist concern, there are no "nationality quotas" in UN peacekeeping operations. Unlike the informal arrangements in certain Secretariat personnel categories, Blue Helmet troops are not recruited as individuals at all, but are deployed and led by their own governments who agree to participate.

As it stands now, instead of strengthening a truly multilateral presence in the Middle East, the proposed non-UN arrangement on the Golan will consolidate even further Washington's unchallenged post-Gulf War regional domination.

CLINTON CLONES BUSH

While the Clinton presidency has differed from that of Bush in a number of respects, the overall pattern of how the UN should and should not be involved in Washington's Middle East strategy has remained largely unchanged. The most explicit articulation of the Clinton administration's early Middle East goals for the UN emerged in the 8 August 1994 letter sent by Ambassador Albright to the incoming president of the Assembly, outlining U.S. priorities for the coming term.

The Middle East section, first of the "Key Issues" identified in the letter, focused solely on developments in the peace process, especially on the Israeli-Palestinian track. It was here that the Clinton administration's more-Catholic-than-the-Pope position toward Israel at the UN became clear, especially if one compared Albright's letter to the statement of Israel's Ambassador Gad Yaacobi made just about a month later.

Yaacobi's own statement was a relatively modest one. He welcomed moves already taken by the UN, such as increasing the role of UNDP, UNRWA, and other economic and development aid agencies in the region; embracing the Madrid process and its progeny; repealing the Zionism is a form of racism resolution, and thereby, he claimed, showing that the General Assembly had "taken to heart . . . the dangers of abusing this forum of peace"; as well as "the removal of contentious language and issues from other resolutions on the Middle East, and the elimination of obsolete resolutions that were contrary to the new reality."(9) The only new thing Yaacobi called for was for Tel Aviv's admission into one of the regional groups (which determine rotating Security Council seats and participation in other geographically chosen positions; in the past Israel had been excluded).

Albright's pro-Israeli agenda was much more ambitious. Her unmistakable goal was to completely remove the issues of Arab-Israeli relations, and especially the question of Palestine, from the UN's political agenda. Albright's approach was to make the claim that the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations of the Madrid/Oslo processes had rendered "caduc" any role or responsibility for the UN beyond economic and development assistance.

Albright began her letter with what sounded like a threat: "Adopting a positive resolution welcoming progress in the peace process, as we did in 1993," she asserted, "will test the UN's new realistic approach." She did not articulate the possible consequence if the General Assembly failed the test: if it refused to define as "progress" the expansion of settlements, the failure to redeploy Israeli troops out of Palestinian population centers and delays in holding elections, and continuing killings (on both sides) that characterized Israel's post-Oslo occupation of Palestine.

She went on to make specific demands. "Contentious resolutions that accentuate political differences without promoting solutions should be consolidated (the various UNRWA resolutions), improved (the Golan resolution) or eliminated (the Israeli nuclear armament resolution and the self-determination resolution)." [Emphasis added.] At the very least, in the face of Israel's consistent refusal to even consider signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty despite global awareness of its 200-plus high-density nuclear bombs in the Dimona plant, this was a stunning proposal.

The piece de resistance of the U.S. 1994 plan for the General Assembly was the demand that "resolution language referring to 'final status' issues should be dropped, since these issues are now under negotiation by the parties themselves. These include refugees, settlements, territorial sovereignty and the status of Jerusalem."(10) [Emphasis added.]

In response, Palestine's Ambassador al-Kidwe conveyed to Albright his shock concerning the call in her letter that "resolution language referring to 'final status issues' should be dropped." He reminded Albright of the not insignificant reality that the final status issues to which she referred in fact "are not yet under negotiation." The Oslo Agreement defers those issues, mandating discussions to begin within three years. Further, al-Kidwe stated, their "deferral does not, and should not, entail any compromise or undermining of the positions held by the international community and the General Assembly in accordance with international law on these issues. Dropping such positions at this stage would be tantamount to forsaking international law and international legitimacy and effectively allowing the illegal, de facto situation created by Israel, the Occupying Power, to prevail when the time for negotiation arrives."(11)

The Assembly in 1994 did vote a ringing endorsement of the Oslo "peace process," though on the specifics of most of the other resolutions mentioned in Albright's letter, the U.S. did not completely succeed. Ambassador al-Kidwe optimistically called the Israeli and U.S. efforts "a big mistake. . . . It seems their effort backfired because their claim of 'UN hands off' was hard to swallow by anybody at the UN."(12)

If analyzed only by looking separately at each specific demand, he was right. The Assembly did pass a resolution calling for the application of the Geneva Conventions to all occupied territories including Jerusalem; it was opposed only by the U.S., Israel, and Gambia. The vote on Israeli practices in the occupied territories was opposed only by the U.S. and Israel; and even the vote on the work of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, targeted for dismemberment by Washington, saw only the U.S. and Israel voting against. And in a series of technical status changes, the emergence of "Palestine" to replace "the PLO" at the UN with observer status parallel to other non-member states, rather than that of a non-member organization, took hold. These included enhanced levels of consultation in planning for the 1995 UN 50th anniversary celebrations, and the lifting of travel restrictions on the Palestinian UN-based diplomatic team. Additionally, the secretary-general appointed a special coordinator for the occupied territories. (Although it must be noted that his mandate is narrowly drawn to reflect U.S. insistence that only issues of economic and development aid to the new Palestinian Authority, be included, not those of politics)

But however valuable the public attention and potential public pressure resulting from strong votes on pro-Palestinian Assembly decisions, the results of those ultimately unenforceable resolutions and symbolic gains within the UN bureaucracy cannot be the only basis for assessing U.S. goals. More broadly, Washington's efforts, throughout the Clinton administration's first and second terms, have broadly succeeded at keeping the UN out of the political trajectory in the Middle East.

There was a certain irony in the Clinton administration's extreme activism supporting Israel at the UN, especially its position regarding Jerusalem and the other issues deferred by the Oslo agreement. Early in his campaign, Clinton had staked out a position calling for Washington to move its embassy to Jerusalem; by the spring of 1995 he faced a new and now embarrassing campaign by Republicans in Congress for this very move, as the GOP tried to reposition itself with Jewish voters in the U.S. as the "real" defender of Israel. With even the Labor-led Israeli government less than enthusiastic about the proposal, understanding its threat to the already-stumbling peace process, the administration was caught. The need at least to appear even-handed on this explosive issue, as the co-sponsor of the peace process, did not seem high on Clinton's list of Middle East priorities.

But Oslo had changed some realities. After Oslo, U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in contradiction to long-standing UN resolutions going back to the 1947 UN partition of Palestine, would mean a shocking abandonment of already frayed U.S. claims of being an honest broker. By 1996, the Republican-led congress had seized the mantle of more-pro-Israeli-than-the-White-House. A bill mandating moving the embassy to Jerusalem was voted at the end of the year, although it provided an opt-out clause for the Clinton administration. Neither Clinton nor his surrogates had much to say. And when Congress voted funds to actually begin building the new embassy in Jerusalem, the Clinton administration's hint that it might be forced to veto the bill was almost whispered; publicly, Israel's "nodding teddy bear" remained virtually silent.

MAJOR-MINOR

Palestine's Ambassador al-Kidwe described his belief, in early 1995, that the U.S. would ensure that "the UN will be playing some role, but will not be allowed to be a major player - major events in Middle East diplomacy will not be played on UN ground."

If anyone wondered whether anything has changed in political circumstances after the end of the Cold War, and the U.S. dominance of the post-Desert Storm Middle East, all she would have to do is look once again at U.S. veto patterns. The last pre-Gulf War veto was cast on 31 May 1990, when the U.S. used its power to prevent the Security Council from passing a resolution condemning Israel's latest violation of Palestinian rights.

After that, the "new" UN of the post-Cold War era was said to be the post-veto era as well, a period of Security Council harmony and growing mutuality of interests. More or less that has proved true, as Russia's desperation to maintain aid and support from the West, and China's trading policy of abstaining from or supporting U.S. initiatives in return for economic or diplomatic perks, led to a virtual abandonment of the veto as part of normal Security Council life.

Until Palestine. In May 1995, the Israeli government, in clear defiance of the Oslo Agreement's plan to defer discussion of the status of Jerusalem, and its commitment to do nothing that would preempt those negotiations, announced new plans to confiscate fifty-three hectares [approximately 131 acres] of Palestinian-owned land for massive settlement building in occupied East Jerusalem. The plan called for the creation of about 3,300 new apartment units, virtually all of them in Jews-only settlements in the Arab side of the city. There was immediate international outrage.

In the UN, the Security Council began to debate the issue on 12 May. Ambassador al-Kidwe, Palestine's Permanent Observer, described the Israeli plan. He said that "Israel must also understand that it cannot achieve peace while continuing to hold the land, that it is not possible to maintain its grip on Jerusalem while demanding normal relations with its neighbors and their friends. Finally, Israel must choose: either there is agreement with the Palestinian side or there is no agreement, because the status of half-agreement is unacceptable and absolutely untenable."(13)

The Israeli answer was simply to claim that "the issue has been taken out of context and blown out of proportion." From Israeli Ambassador Yaacobi's vantage point, the only problems were semantic. "The recent decision," he told the Council, "to expropriate, not to confiscate, land for construction in Jerusalem - not for settlements as was said here - is based on our long-standing policy. . . ."(14)

As for the U.S., Washington's Middle East specialist at the UN mission, Tom Gnehm, told the Council that "it is difficult to see how such actions [as Israel's land seizures] promote the peace process." But, he went on, "having said that, we do not believe that this [the UN] is the appropriate forum for dealing with this issue."(15) The U.S. would not deviate from its assurance to Tel Aviv that it would "show due consideration for Israel's positions in the peace process."(16)

Ambassador al-Kidwe reminded the Council of the special role of the U.S.:

The American co-sponsors [of the peace process] carry a larger responsibility in this regard because of their special relationship with Israel and because of the letters of assurance they provided to the parties participating in the process, including the letter of assurance to the Palestinian side, which was an integral component of the basis for Palestinian participation in the whole process. The letter of assurance, dated 24 October 1991, states the following about the issue of Jerusalem:

The United States is opposed to the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem and the extension of Israeli law on it and the extension of Jerusalem's municipal boundaries. We encourage all sides to avoid unilateral acts that would exacerbate local tensions or make negotiations more difficult or preempt their outcome.

We are now witnessing precisely such actions, and we hope that the United States will take a clear position in keeping with its assurances in this regard.(17)

The U.S. position remained clear; its assurances to Israel remained preeminent. After four days of debate, the Council voted on a resolution condemning Israel's land seizure and calling for it to be reversed. The vote was 14 to 1. The U.S. voted no. The veto was cast, the first since the end of the Cold War. It was not to be the last.

It is likely not a coincidence that the 1994 edition of the UN's annual report on "The United Nations and the Question of Palestine,"(18) unlike all earlier editions, left out the official maps featured before: the map of the UN's 1947 Partition Plan and UN Armistice Lines of 1949, showing the large area designated for an internationally-supervised Jerusalem;(19) the map of territories occupied by Israel since June 1967, showing half of Jerusalem as occupied;(20) and the map showing the proliferation of Israeli settlements throughout the occupied territories.(21)

The photographs, in the slick and larger-sized 1994 edition, were missing too; perhaps it was only financial considerations that led to the decision to drop the maps. But maybe not. With the UN kept so starkly out of the political loop on the question of Palestine, in contrast to U.S.-orchestrated UN activism in so many other conflicts, and with the charges of U.S. double standards hovering over the issue, the political symbolism of missing maps is impossible to ignore.

A SECOND TERM, FEW SECOND THOUGHTS

Clinton's second term has emerged with little change in his commitment to keep the UN out of the Middle East. The April 1996 crisis in Lebanon, culminating with the bombing of the UNIFIL headquarters at Qana and the slaughter of over 100 civilians and wounding of four UN peacekeepers, brought the world organization to center stage of Middle East politics. Still, the Clinton administration kept up intense pressure to prevent any UN action that might result in sanctions or even serious criticism of the Israeli bombardment, demanding instead an "even-handed" UN approach.

At the United Nations even that represented a tactical shift for the U.S. On 15 April, before the Qana massacre, Washington refused to allow the Security Council to pass a resolution only modestly critical of Israel's earlier assaults in Lebanon. An even less weighty statement to be issued by the Council president was deemed unacceptable as well. U.S. officials made clear before the emergency Council meeting even convened, that nothing would be allowed to come out of it, that the meeting would be held only to allow speeches to be made. It was a safety valve, viewed as necessary to release the rapidly escalating pressure for the global body to condemn Israel's - at least criminally disproportionate assault on Lebanon.

But after the bloody events at Qana, the U.S. changed its tune slightly. Clinton's shift to a call for a cease-fire by both parties opened the way for the Council to at least murmur its discontent. It was a limited opening, however. The Arab Group's draft resolution condemned Israel's attacks (though it was actually written several days earlier and thus did not include any specific mention of the Qana massacre) and reasserted the requirement of the Council's 1978 Resolution 425 for an immediate Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon. To no one's surprise, it failed for the lack of the requisite nine votes. Only Egypt, Indonesia, China and Guinea-Bissau supported the resolution; the U.S. and Britain led the rest of the Council in a silent abstention en masse.

The U.S.-drafted substitute, condemned no one, called for an immediate "cessation of hostilities by all parties," and "deplored" (rather than "condemned", a diplo-speak lowering of the criticism) the Qana carnage in which "shelling resulted in heavy loss of life" as if the shells had fallen on their own from an unforgiving sky. A major focus of the resolution's language, and the clear rationale for the Clinton administration's Qana-driven change of course, was to prevent the collapse of the then barely-functional Middle East peace process, insuring that the Israeli-Palestinian and especially the long-stalled Israeli-Syrian talks did not collapse. The resolution passed the Council unanimously.

Public outrage, not only in the Arab World, flared. But the U.S. had set the terms: there would be no international pressure on Tel Aviv to withdraw from its 18-year-old occupation of Lebanon. UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali did express "shock and horror" at the Qana attack, and condemnation "in the strongest possible terms." (His report, issued months later, essentially rejected Israel's claim that targeting the Fijian UN peacekeepers' base was a "mistake." The U.S. demanded that the report not be released; the SG refused, and it was made public, though without overwhelming press interest. Many believe that the Boutros-Ghali's insistence on releasing the report was one of the factors contributing to the vitriol that characterized Madeleine Albright's campaign against a second term for the unpopular Egyptian.)

The General Assembly, in a three-day session called specifically in reaction to the Council's failure to act, passed a resolution condemning Israel's military attacks on Lebanon's civilian population, and calling on Israel "to withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory in conformity with Security Council Resolution 425." In an effort to win broader (especially European) support, a last-minute Russian amendment confirmed "the rights of all states in the region to live in peace and security within their internationally recognized borders." It did not work. Technically the measure passed, 64 in favor with only two votes (Israel and the U.S.) against. But there were 65 abstentions, including Japan, most Latin American states and members of the European Union, and the impact of the Assembly action rang hollow.

In fact, none of the UN actions mattered much. It was another example of the UN being sidelined from the real [read: U.S.-driven] diplomatic motion in the Middle East. Then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher's shuttle was immediately dubbed "the only game in town" in the effort to craft a cease-fire. His efforts faced competition not only from the out-of-the-loop UN, but more significantly from the European Union and France. Paris moved quickly, sending Foreign Minister Herve de Charette on a parallel shuttle mission, while the EU troika led by Italy's Susanna Agnelli tried to intercede as well. The U.S. largely succeeded in marginalizing their efforts, although the resulting U.S.French tension added fuel to an already simmering cross-Atlantic fire.

It was a couple of weeks after Israel's savage assault on Qana and across Lebanon, though before the election of right-wing Bibi Netanyahu, that a leading Israeli newspaper thought it time to murmur the truth. The feel-your-pain, human rights-spouting Bill Clinton would "go down in the history of Israel as the first American president to be a teddy bear nodding yes, yes," reported Yediot Aharanot. "It is doubtful," the editorial went on, "that an American leader ever applauded on a public stage where the prime minister of Israel was being praised for being the patron of the nuclear facility in Dimona. It is unlikely that an American president (other than Clinton) would have defended Israeli shelling of a neighboring state which led to so many deaths."(22) The U.S. refusal to allow the UN a serious diplomatic role was only one more example.

ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS SPARK NEW UN RESOLVE

When later crises in Palestine led to direct clashes between Palestinian civilians and Israeli troops, including the tunnel riots of late 1996, UN resolutions remained largely at the level of condemnation. It was not until the still-unfinished defiance of Israel's new settlement on Jabal Abu Ghneim in Jerusalem, that the UN scene began to shift, albeit slightly. When Israeli bulldozers moved onto the Abu Ghneim hilltop in March 1997 and widely anticipated clashes broke out, the gravity of Israel's brazen violation of international law, UN resolutions and the Geneva conventions seemed to take on a stronger cast. With a strong 14 - 1 majority, the Security Council tried to challenge Israel's settlement policy on 7 March. But the one stood fast, and the U.S. cast its veto again, repeating its action two weeks later, on 22 March, when the Council tried again. (After significant pressure from Washington, Costa Rica abstained on the second Council vote of 13 - 1.)

The more significant difference came in between. On 13 March, the General Assembly voted 130 to 2 calling on Israel to stop the Abu Ghneim settlement, what the Israelis call Hat Homa. Of course the Assembly resolution carried no threat of enforcement. But the breadth of its consensus, with only the U.S. and Israel itself voting against, sent a message strengthened by its emergence in the face of the U.S. vetoes in the Council.

Later in the spring, the Arab Group called for a special session of the Assembly, specifically to take up the question of settlements. The call was endorsed by the 10 April meeting in New Delhi of 74 foreign ministers of the Non-Aligned Movement. Their statement, "in view of the urgency and seriousness of the situation," called on "NAM countries, as a first step, to freeze relations with Israel at their current level, and use all available measures to ensure Israel's compliance with the terms of reference of the Madrid Conference. . . ."(23)

When the special session was held, the resolution moved slightly beyond condemnation. While still lacking enforcement power, the Assembly not only condemned Israel's failure to comply with earlier resolutions, but recommended to member states "that they actively discourage activities which directly contribute to any construction or development of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian Territory, including Jerusalem; and demands that Israel, the occupying Power, make available to Member States the necessary information about goods produced or manufactured in the illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem." The unmistakable implication was that such goods would be subject to, if not full embargo, at least exclusion from the favorable international trade regimes on which Israel depends. A follow-up meeting of the special session was held to discuss further the report of the secretary-general on the status of settlements in the occupied territories.

While such multilateral initiatives will no doubt proceed at a glacial pace, the fact that a UN body even hinted at potential sanctions against Israel sanctions that would be possible to impose if member states chose to implement them, with or without Council enforcement - represents a significant change. Providing further gravity to the Assembly consideration is the fact that other international bodies are beginning, albeit skittishly, to look more carefully at how they implement trade privileges for goods produced not in Israel, but in Israeli settlements built in occupied territory. The European Union, for example, has long held that the settlements represent a clear violation of international law. So far, the EU has failed to apply that understanding to its trade relations with Israel, and has allowed Israel's declaration that settlement-produced goods are "Israeli" to govern the applicability of trade privileges. Now, for the first time, that failure is finally coming under the critical eye of some European countries concerned with their own governments' commitment to consistency and to international law.

In an era in which considerations of international law are rising to higher places on global agendas, the continuing conflict between United Nations efforts to implement global consensus views on the question of Palestine, and the strategically unchallenged power of the United States to undermine and derail those efforts, remains at the heart of understanding the UN's role in the Middle East today.

Over time, perhaps more important than the specifics of his administration's response to crises in Palestine, Lebanon or elsewhere, is the stark reality that Clinton no longer asserts, or even seems to feel obligated to acknowledge, the once formulaic framework of land for peace and UN resolution 242 as the bedrock of U.S. Middle East policy. Those ideas have, as Helena Cobban suggests, "been eroded away to near invisibility."(24) So while European or Non-Aligned or United Nations initiatives may attempt, and occasionally even succeed in recapturing a diplomatic role for the international community in Palestine at certain particular junctures, those initiatives are unlikely to reverse Washington's strategic domination of that political process. Until those eroded internationally-accepted frameworks are reclaimed, rebuilt, reasserted and defended anew by Washington itself, the progress of a U.S.driven "peace process" will continue to fail.

NOTES

1. Ambassador Nasser al-Kidwe, speech to annual symposium of North American Coordinating Committee of NGOs on the Question of Palestine, Toronto, June 1994.

2. "The United Nations and the Question of Palestine," UN Department of Public Information, October 1994, DPI/1481.

3. Interview, 9 October 1990.

4. Paul Lewis, "U.S. Backs UN Bid Criticizing Israel," New York Times, 17 December 1990.

5. Ma'ariv, Israel, August 4, 1991, Draft U.S.-Israeli Memorandum of Understanding of 2 August 1991, reprinted in "Documents and Source Material," Journal of Palestine Studies zz81, Autumn 1991, p. 182.

6. Jerusalem Post, 16 October 1991, reprinted in "Documents and Source Material," Journal of Palestine Studies zz83, Spring 1992, p. 114.

7. Information from Non-Aligned diplomatic sources.

8. Lee H. Hamilton, "Peacekeeping That Works," Christian Science Monitor, 30 June 1994.

9. Ambassador Gad Yaacobi, statement on Commemoration of 50th Anniversary of the UN, 9 November 1994.

10. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, letter to president of General Assembly, 8 August 1994.

11. Ambassador Nasser al-Kidwe, letter to Madeleine Albright, 13 September 1994.

12. Interview with Ambassador al-Kidwe, 25 January 1995.

13. Ambassador Nasser al-Kidwe, Security Council speech, 12 May 1995.

14. Ambassador Gad Yaacobi, Security Council speech, 12 May 1995.

15. Tom Gnehm, U.S. representative, Security Council speech, 12 May 1995.

16. U.S. Letter of Assurances to Israel, Jerusalem Post, 16 October 1991.

17. Ambassador al-Kidwe letter to Madeleine Albright.

18. "The UN and the Question of Palestine," DPI/1481 - 94-93324 October 1994, published by UN Department of Public Information.

19. "The United Nations and the Question of Palestine," DPI/86141360, November 1985, published by UN Department of Public Information, p. 8.

20. Ibid., p. 17.

21. Ibid., p. 25.

22. (Agence France Press, 15 May 1996.)

23. Statement quoted by Dilip Ganguly, Associated Press, 10 April 1997.

24. "In Mideast, All Eyes on the U.S.," Christian Science Monitor, 13 June 1996.

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow in Middle East and UN affairs at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C. Her most recent book is Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN. Portions of this article draw on that book.